Payroll app onboarding
Company
Factorial HR
Date
Jul 23 - Sep 23
Role
I worked on this project as a product designer and product manager. Main areas of responsibility:
Research and Discovery (customer interviews, diagrams, user journeys)
Management (sprint planning and weekly reviews)
Design (end to end onboarding)
Prototyping (user testing and validation, communication with stakeholders)
QA (ensuring 1:1 quality with designs through user story acceptance criteria)
Summary
I joined the payroll team to tackle a key issue – the team was missing a product designer and the curve in new companies activating and using the product on a monthly basis was flat. The goals were clear: increase monthly activations and overall product usage. Starting with a smoother onboarding process, I aimed to help users understand the app's value and complete essential tasks before diving in, resulting into a growth from 43 to 500 companies onboarding monthly.
Challenge
The challenge lay in the existing limitation where some users had to create new additional compensation types one by one, in order to get started to run Payroll, causing a highly frictional process, since they could not do this in bulk for several employees at a time. This pain was resulting in revenue loss, with some account executives (AMs) citing this as a reason for lost deals during the sales process, having a significant impact on Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), amounting to a loss of 12K €. In response to this challenge, the goal was to address this pain within the onboarding initiative, with a limited time investment of 6 weeks.
Solution
The solution consisted of a three-phased scope:
A Wizard to onboard customers and guide them through completing must-have tasks before using the app.
A First Steps component to lead them through nice-to-have but recommended tasks complementing the value of payroll through connecting with apps that created synergy (e.g.: Financial Insights, a space for companies to understand the financial wellness of their company that could be nurtured by uploading their payroll summaries; or Payroll Updates, a hub to streamline payroll-impacting updates for companies and bookkeepers to manage them more efficiently).
A refactor of the Settings page to enhance the usability and discoverability of existing features.
Additionally, we decided to address the pain of creating additional compensations in bulk, introducing a very scoped MVP. This enabled users to assign additional compensations to multiple employees when they created one for a specific employee. This strategic enhancement aimed to streamline and simplify the onboarding process, providing users with a more efficient and comprehensive solution.
Research
Business context: Customer and market inputs - Closed lost deals, churn reasons, MRR impacted
Payroll Activation & Sales team-sync: Weekly syncs with the Payroll Activation & Sales team
User pain points: Unclear value proposition, frictional onboarding process
Competitive audit: Personio, Gusto, Remote, Payfit
Ideation
Product Requirements: Gather customer and market input to justify what and why we were doing; formulate hypothesis and success metrics; define design and functional requirements, and others
Diagrams and user journeys: Understand how the end to end solution should work
Wireframes: First representations of the solution for fast validation
Proof of concept and prototype: A usable prototype to validate with users with final look and feel
Validation
Stakeholder reviews: Sales cycle (Account executives and managers), C-Level
Design critiques: PDs, PMs, Engineers
User testing: Small groups of users (promoters and detractors)
Some features
Onboarding
I designed a stepped wizard that served as a user-friendly guide to onboard new users onto the Payroll app. This stepped wizard chunked information, breaking down complex processes into manageable steps. Its primary objectives included helping users comprehend the app's value proposition and ensuring they completed essential tasks before fully utilizing Payroll. Users were seamlessly led through must-have tasks, such as creating a payroll policy (a group of employees for payroll processing under specific conditions like country, currency, or periodicity).
Additionally, users could choose which payroll-impacting updates to track and select an integration to install, connecting seamlessly with their calculation software. This wizard aimed to enhance user understanding, facilitated task completion, and optimized the initial user experience within the Payroll app.
First-steps
I designed the 'First Steps' component as a follow-up to the stepped wizard. This component played a crucial role in guiding users through additional, nice-to-have tasks to further optimize their experience with the Payroll app and increase discoverability of other touchpoints.
It recommended tasks aimed at maximizing the efficiency of payroll processes, such as discovering the Financial Insights app to nurture financial insights post-payroll runs.
Users were also encouraged to explore employee updates, facilitating centralized communications with their bookkeepers for managing changes like contract adjustments, new hires, rehires, and terminations. Additionally, the 'First Steps' component allowed users to refine additional settings, providing a holistic approach to enhancing the overall usability and functionality of the Payroll app.
Request Payroll Specialists help
The 'Request Help' modal I designed served as a direct communication channel for users to connect with our payroll specialists team. This modal was strategically aimed at maximizing revenue by offering monetized consultancies. It allowed users to seek assistance, guidance, or personalized support from our specialists. This feature not only prioritized user support but also contributed to the overall revenue strategy by providing users with valuable consultative services tailored to their specific needs.
New settings layout
The initial layout lacked user-friendly elements, with certain settings proving challenging to discover and use effectively. Furthermore, some settings were technically coupled to other code resources that belonged to different endpoints of the app, demanding both a technical refactor and a design abstraction. The goal was to create a more intuitive and accessible settings layout, ensuring users could easily navigate and configure their payroll settings without encountering usability challenges.
Assign additional compensations to multiple employees
This feature aimed to streamline the process for managers when editing an employee's contract. Within this workflow, if a manager created an additional compensation, they were prompted with the option to assign it to other employees.
Business impact
The new onboarding process had a transformative impact on several key metrics within a relatively short timeframe:
Monthly active companies went from 43 to an impressive 500 in just around 4 months, showcasing a significant increase in user engagement and adoption.
Moreover, the number of payroll updates successfully managed experienced rapid growth, escalating from around 2k to 7.8k updates within approximately 4 months, indicating a substantial improvement in product usage.
Additionally, the streamlined onboarding contributed to a notable growth in companies exporting payroll data for calculation, going from around 400 to 600 companies in around 4 months.
These positive shifts in key metrics proved the effectiveness of the solution in driving user engagement and enhancing overall product usage.
Companies onboarding monthly
Updates successfully managed monthly
Companies exporting payroll data monthly
Payroll app onboarding
Company
Factorial HR
Date
Jul 23 - Sep 23
Role
I worked on this project as a product designer and product manager. Main areas of responsibility:
Research and Discovery (customer interviews, diagrams, user journeys)
Management (sprint planning and weekly reviews)
Design (end to end onboarding)
Prototyping (user testing and validation, communication with stakeholders)
QA (ensuring 1:1 quality with designs through user story acceptance criteria)
Summary
I joined the payroll team to tackle a key issue – the team was missing a product designer and the curve in new companies activating and using the product on a monthly basis was flat. The goals were clear: increase monthly activations and overall product usage. Starting with a smoother onboarding process, I aimed to help users understand the app's value and complete essential tasks before diving in, resulting into a growth from 43 to 500 companies onboarding monthly.
Challenge
The challenge lay in the existing limitation where some users had to create new additional compensation types one by one, in order to get started to run Payroll, causing a highly frictional process, since they could not do this in bulk for several employees at a time. This pain was resulting in revenue loss, with some account executives (AMs) citing this as a reason for lost deals during the sales process, having a significant impact on Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), amounting to a loss of 12K €. In response to this challenge, the goal was to address this pain within the onboarding initiative, with a limited time investment of 6 weeks.
Solution
The solution consisted of a three-phased scope:
A Wizard to onboard customers and guide them through completing must-have tasks before using the app.
A First Steps component to lead them through nice-to-have but recommended tasks complementing the value of payroll through connecting with apps that created synergy (e.g.: Financial Insights, a space for companies to understand the financial wellness of their company that could be nurtured by uploading their payroll summaries; or Payroll Updates, a hub to streamline payroll-impacting updates for companies and bookkeepers to manage them more efficiently).
A refactor of the Settings page to enhance the usability and discoverability of existing features.
Additionally, we decided to address the pain of creating additional compensations in bulk, introducing a very scoped MVP. This enabled users to assign additional compensations to multiple employees when they created one for a specific employee. This strategic enhancement aimed to streamline and simplify the onboarding process, providing users with a more efficient and comprehensive solution.
Research
Business context: Customer and market inputs - Closed lost deals, churn reasons, MRR impacted
Payroll Activation & Sales team-sync: Weekly syncs with the Payroll Activation & Sales team
User pain points: Unclear value proposition, frictional onboarding process
Competitive audit: Personio, Gusto, Remote, Payfit
Ideation
Product Requirements: Gather customer and market input to justify what and why we were doing; formulate hypothesis and success metrics; define design and functional requirements, and others
Diagrams and user journeys: Understand how the end to end solution should work
Wireframes: First representations of the solution for fast validation
Proof of concept and prototype: A usable prototype to validate with users with final look and feel
Validation
Stakeholder reviews: Sales cycle (Account executives and managers), C-Level
Design critiques: PDs, PMs, Engineers
User testing: Small groups of users (promoters and detractors)
Some features
Onboarding
I designed a stepped wizard that served as a user-friendly guide to onboard new users onto the Payroll app. This stepped wizard chunked information, breaking down complex processes into manageable steps. Its primary objectives included helping users comprehend the app's value proposition and ensuring they completed essential tasks before fully utilizing Payroll. Users were seamlessly led through must-have tasks, such as creating a payroll policy (a group of employees for payroll processing under specific conditions like country, currency, or periodicity).
Additionally, users could choose which payroll-impacting updates to track and select an integration to install, connecting seamlessly with their calculation software. This wizard aimed to enhance user understanding, facilitated task completion, and optimized the initial user experience within the Payroll app.
First-steps
I designed the 'First Steps' component as a follow-up to the stepped wizard. This component played a crucial role in guiding users through additional, nice-to-have tasks to further optimize their experience with the Payroll app and increase discoverability of other touchpoints.
It recommended tasks aimed at maximizing the efficiency of payroll processes, such as discovering the Financial Insights app to nurture financial insights post-payroll runs.
Users were also encouraged to explore employee updates, facilitating centralized communications with their bookkeepers for managing changes like contract adjustments, new hires, rehires, and terminations. Additionally, the 'First Steps' component allowed users to refine additional settings, providing a holistic approach to enhancing the overall usability and functionality of the Payroll app.
Request Payroll Specialists help
The 'Request Help' modal I designed served as a direct communication channel for users to connect with our payroll specialists team. This modal was strategically aimed at maximizing revenue by offering monetized consultancies. It allowed users to seek assistance, guidance, or personalized support from our specialists. This feature not only prioritized user support but also contributed to the overall revenue strategy by providing users with valuable consultative services tailored to their specific needs.
New settings layout
The initial layout lacked user-friendly elements, with certain settings proving challenging to discover and use effectively. Furthermore, some settings were technically coupled to other code resources that belonged to different endpoints of the app, demanding both a technical refactor and a design abstraction. The goal was to create a more intuitive and accessible settings layout, ensuring users could easily navigate and configure their payroll settings without encountering usability challenges.
Assign additional compensations to multiple employees
This feature aimed to streamline the process for managers when editing an employee's contract. Within this workflow, if a manager created an additional compensation, they were prompted with the option to assign it to other employees.
Business impact
The new onboarding process had a transformative impact on several key metrics within a relatively short timeframe:
Monthly active companies went from 43 to an impressive 500 in just around 4 months, showcasing a significant increase in user engagement and adoption.
Moreover, the number of payroll updates successfully managed experienced rapid growth, escalating from around 2k to 7.8k updates within approximately 4 months, indicating a substantial improvement in product usage.
Additionally, the streamlined onboarding contributed to a notable growth in companies exporting payroll data for calculation, going from around 400 to 600 companies in around 4 months.
These positive shifts in key metrics proved the effectiveness of the solution in driving user engagement and enhancing overall product usage.
Companies onboarding monthly
Updates successfully managed monthly
Companies exporting payroll data monthly
Payroll app onboarding
Company
Factorial HR
Date
Jul 23 - Sep 23
Role
I worked on this project as a product designer and product manager. Main areas of responsibility:
Research and Discovery (customer interviews, diagrams, user journeys)
Management (sprint planning and weekly reviews)
Design (end to end onboarding)
Prototyping (user testing and validation, communication with stakeholders)
QA (ensuring 1:1 quality with designs through user story acceptance criteria)
Summary
I joined the payroll team to tackle a key issue – the team was missing a product designer and the curve in new companies activating and using the product on a monthly basis was flat. The goals were clear: increase monthly activations and overall product usage. Starting with a smoother onboarding process, I aimed to help users understand the app's value and complete essential tasks before diving in, resulting into a growth from 43 to 500 companies onboarding monthly.
Challenge
The challenge lay in the existing limitation where some users had to create new additional compensation types one by one, in order to get started to run Payroll, causing a highly frictional process, since they could not do this in bulk for several employees at a time. This pain was resulting in revenue loss, with some account executives (AMs) citing this as a reason for lost deals during the sales process, having a significant impact on Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), amounting to a loss of 12K €. In response to this challenge, the goal was to address this pain within the onboarding initiative, with a limited time investment of 6 weeks.
Solution
The solution consisted of a three-phased scope:
A Wizard to onboard customers and guide them through completing must-have tasks before using the app.
A First Steps component to lead them through nice-to-have but recommended tasks complementing the value of payroll through connecting with apps that created synergy (e.g.: Financial Insights, a space for companies to understand the financial wellness of their company that could be nurtured by uploading their payroll summaries; or Payroll Updates, a hub to streamline payroll-impacting updates for companies and bookkeepers to manage them more efficiently).
A refactor of the Settings page to enhance the usability and discoverability of existing features.
Additionally, we decided to address the pain of creating additional compensations in bulk, introducing a very scoped MVP. This enabled users to assign additional compensations to multiple employees when they created one for a specific employee. This strategic enhancement aimed to streamline and simplify the onboarding process, providing users with a more efficient and comprehensive solution.
Research
Business context: Customer and market inputs - Closed lost deals, churn reasons, MRR impacted
Payroll Activation & Sales team-sync: Weekly syncs with the Payroll Activation & Sales team
User pain points: Unclear value proposition, frictional onboarding process
Competitive audit: Personio, Gusto, Remote, Payfit
Ideation
Product Requirements: Gather customer and market input to justify what and why we were doing; formulate hypothesis and success metrics; define design and functional requirements, and others
Diagrams and user journeys: Understand how the end to end solution should work
Wireframes: First representations of the solution for fast validation
Proof of concept and prototype: A usable prototype to validate with users with final look and feel
Validation
Stakeholder reviews: Sales cycle (Account executives and managers), C-Level
Design critiques: PDs, PMs, Engineers
User testing: Small groups of users (promoters and detractors)
Some features
Onboarding
I designed a stepped wizard that served as a user-friendly guide to onboard new users onto the Payroll app. This stepped wizard chunked information, breaking down complex processes into manageable steps. Its primary objectives included helping users comprehend the app's value proposition and ensuring they completed essential tasks before fully utilizing Payroll. Users were seamlessly led through must-have tasks, such as creating a payroll policy (a group of employees for payroll processing under specific conditions like country, currency, or periodicity).
Additionally, users could choose which payroll-impacting updates to track and select an integration to install, connecting seamlessly with their calculation software. This wizard aimed to enhance user understanding, facilitated task completion, and optimized the initial user experience within the Payroll app.
First-steps
I designed the 'First Steps' component as a follow-up to the stepped wizard. This component played a crucial role in guiding users through additional, nice-to-have tasks to further optimize their experience with the Payroll app and increase discoverability of other touchpoints.
It recommended tasks aimed at maximizing the efficiency of payroll processes, such as discovering the Financial Insights app to nurture financial insights post-payroll runs.
Users were also encouraged to explore employee updates, facilitating centralized communications with their bookkeepers for managing changes like contract adjustments, new hires, rehires, and terminations. Additionally, the 'First Steps' component allowed users to refine additional settings, providing a holistic approach to enhancing the overall usability and functionality of the Payroll app.
Request Payroll Specialists help
The 'Request Help' modal I designed served as a direct communication channel for users to connect with our payroll specialists team. This modal was strategically aimed at maximizing revenue by offering monetized consultancies. It allowed users to seek assistance, guidance, or personalized support from our specialists. This feature not only prioritized user support but also contributed to the overall revenue strategy by providing users with valuable consultative services tailored to their specific needs.
New settings layout
The initial layout lacked user-friendly elements, with certain settings proving challenging to discover and use effectively. Furthermore, some settings were technically coupled to other code resources that belonged to different endpoints of the app, demanding both a technical refactor and a design abstraction. The goal was to create a more intuitive and accessible settings layout, ensuring users could easily navigate and configure their payroll settings without encountering usability challenges.
Assign additional compensations to multiple employees
This feature aimed to streamline the process for managers when editing an employee's contract. Within this workflow, if a manager created an additional compensation, they were prompted with the option to assign it to other employees.
Business impact
The new onboarding process had a transformative impact on several key metrics within a relatively short timeframe:
Monthly active companies went from 43 to an impressive 500 in just around 4 months, showcasing a significant increase in user engagement and adoption.
Moreover, the number of payroll updates successfully managed experienced rapid growth, escalating from around 2k to 7.8k updates within approximately 4 months, indicating a substantial improvement in product usage.
Additionally, the streamlined onboarding contributed to a notable growth in companies exporting payroll data for calculation, going from around 400 to 600 companies in around 4 months.
These positive shifts in key metrics proved the effectiveness of the solution in driving user engagement and enhancing overall product usage.
Companies onboarding monthly
Updates successfully managed monthly
Companies exporting payroll data monthly